No gods, no kings, no billionaires
You know those days when you just have to eat an entire 400g bar of Toblerone chocolate triangles? I’ve been having a lot of those lately.
Fortunately for my waistline, I haven’t been giving in to the temptation. Today was an exception, though. After several weeks of searching, this morning I accepted a nice job offer, and gave notice of resignation to my current employer. If that’s not worthy of some chocolate gluttony, I don’t know what is.
We’re off to the Netherlands for the weekend. It’s my high school reunion. I’ll be seeing people I haven’t seen since I left school in 1989. Wow.
I don’t get much comments spam myself right now (maybe a message a week or so), but the problem is definitely getting worse.
For Movable Type installations, there are several solutions available, such as an option to provide a “delete this comment” link with every “new comment” email, and a combined url blocker/comments hider technique. Also, some people have proposed collaborative blacklists, or collaborative authentication for comments posters.
I’m surprised that no-one seems to have suggested Bayesian filtering for comments, though. I get about 15-20 spam messages via email every day, but the SpamBayes plugin for Outlook routes almost all of them straight into a “Spam” folder. I never see them in my inbox. Maybe one or two message in a hundred make it through the filter, and I haven’t had any false positives for ages. It doesn’t involve maintaining blacklists, and it’s a lot less effort than deleting every single junk message.
In Movable Type, it you could have a “bayesfilter” property on the MTComments template tag: <MTComments bayesfilter="1">. All comments would have to pass through the filter, and only those that were not spam would make it on to the page.
You’d need some additional mechanism to “train” the system, and somewhere to put the statistical knowledge base the filter uses to tell spam from genuine comments. Finally, you’d need a way of correcting the system after the initial training, so that any spam that does make it through can be deleted with prejudice, and so that false positives can be corrected.
This would be a nice anti-spam comments system. It would involve a Movable Type plugin, and some hacking to the Movable Type application itself. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do this right now, and even if I did have time, I’ve sworn off perl. (Did you know that “perl” is an anagram of “pain”?) But I wonder if the Lazyweb could do it for me, or if the nice people at Six Apart would be so kind as to include this feature in MT Pro?
Sidelined Protagonist Syndrome (SPS) is what happens when a writer gets to the end of a story, finds that the Protagonist doesn’t have the means to resolve (or even influence) the final conflict themselves, and therefore pulls in an Outside Agency to do it for them. The Protagonist may skulk around the periphery of the action and deliver a running commentary on events, or they may get called in for the mopping-up scene, where they find out how the Outside Agency put the pieces together and finally came through to pull the Protagonist’s nuts out of the fire.
Key questions to ask to find out if a story is suffering from SPS:
The worst case of SPS I’ve come across recently was Vitals by Greg Bear. Nasty. If you can think of any, please zap ’em in the comment section.
Alex still cries when I drop him off at nursery in the mornings. Or at least, he does most of the time. He was okay-ish this Monday–no all-out despair and wailing–but on Tuesday I saw a side of him that doesn’t usually come out when I leave him there.
He was looking exceptionally cool that morning: blue long-sleeved shirt, tan corduroys, new brown boots, denim jacket, and orange sunglasses. After I took off his jacket and shades, he poked his head through the doorway into the toddler room and scoped out the joint. Then he walked back to me and put his hands up in the universal “cuddle” gesture. So far, so normal.
I picked him up, and together we walked into the room. He rested his chin on my shoulder, but he didn’t seem as upset as he often does. One of the nursery assistants came up to us, said hello, and asked Alex if he wanted a cuddle from her. He nodded quietly, and clambered over into her arms.
I was just starting to wave goodbye to him, when I noticed two young girls, both a little older than Alex, maybe 3 or 3 and a half, walking over. They waved at him and said “Alex! Alex! Hello Alex!”
He looked down at them, and then back at me. His early morning frown slowly turned into a sly, cheeky grin, as if to say, “Look what I’ve found.”
There he was, my two-year-old son, already at the centre of attention of gangs of adoring older women. He may be Super Tantrum Toddler Man at home, but he can turn the charm all the way up to 11 when he wants to.
What a boy.
No way is it ten years since Sting released his album Ten Summoners Tales. Nuh-uh. I mean, 1993? Come on. That’s ten years ago. I think someone has been in to our house, and doctored the sleeves on our CDs. Whoever it was is very good at it. I can hardly tell the difference between the rest of the text on the CD sleeve, and the ficticious release date they inserted. Still, it creeps me out that someone broke into our house just to change that one date…
…wait a minute…
They’ve been at my Sarah McLachlan CDs as well! No way was Surfacing released back in 1997. Nuh-uh. I don’t believe it.